Paperspace free tier: Free GPU (M4000) notebooks

Paperspace’s free offer is hardware access, not a dollar credit: the free plan includes a Free GPU (M4000) and a Free CPU (C4), and the DigitalOcean docs scope them: free machines “can only be used for Notebooks in private workspaces”. The free plan carries 5 GB of storage. There is no credit amount to spend down and no expiry date; it is an ongoing plan feature. The pricing page caps free machines with “Auto-shutdown (12 hour limit)” per session. Whether a card is required to use the free machines is not stated. Paperspace is owned by DigitalOcean, and its pricing also lives in DigitalOcean’s docs. Checked on 2026-09-02.

What “free GPU” means here

The free machine is an Nvidia M4000, an older GPU. The official scope wording is narrow: notebooks in private workspaces only. That excludes general VMs, deployments, and anything you would SSH into as a server. If your mental model is “free GPU cloud instance”, this is not that; it is a free notebook runtime. For a dollar-denominated GPU credit instead, the Thunder Compute student credit is $20 on A6000 or L40 instances, if you qualify.

Session limits: what is stated and what is not

The paperspace.com pricing page states one hard number for the free tiers: “Auto-shutdown (12 hour limit)”, against “Auto-shutdown (configurable)” on paid tiers. So a free notebook session ends after 12 hours, seen 2026-09-02; this entry previously reported session caps as not stated, and the correction is logged in the changelog. What remains unstated is any monthly hour cap: neither the pricing page nor the DigitalOcean pricing docs give one, and the docs page does not repeat the 12-hour figure either. If you need guaranteed monthly hours, assume nothing.

Costs that continue when machines are off

Per the official pricing pages: storage and public IPs bill even when machines are off. The free plan includes 5 GB of storage; growth beyond included storage is billable. A free-tier notebook habit can still produce a small bill if you accumulate storage.

Paid rates for context

On the same official pricing pages: a paid M4000 is $0.45 per hour, and an H100 on demand is $5.95 per hour. That gap is the point of the free tier: it gives you the bottom rung of the ladder at $0.

The DigitalOcean connection

Paperspace is DigitalOcean’s ML-facing product line, and the docs live under docs.digitalocean.com. The DigitalOcean $5 signup credit is a separate offer with its own rules on the DigitalOcean side; neither offer references the other on the official pages.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. I have not run notebooks on the free M4000 myself, so this page reports only what the official pages state.

Choose Paperspace’s free tier if a notebook on an older GPU covers your experiment. Skip it if you need a VM, modern GPU hours, or stated session guarantees. For the broader decision, see choosing between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox, and the credits index for every grant I track.